Tag Archives: Christianity

From the modern perspective it is hard to understand how amorphous the early Christian movements were. In the first few hundred years after the death of Christ, much of what we now take for granted as pillars of the Christian faith were still in dispute. Were Christians Jews? Was Christ divine? Leaders of the Christian movement argued and died over these questions. Rubenstein, the author of Aristotle’s Children, another engaging book religious history attempts to tell the complicated story of this time in an accessible way. Overall he does a bangup job.

Like Rubenstein’s other works, When Jesus Became God is a good book with a misleading title. This isn’t really about defining the nature of Christianity – such a book would have to be much longer and more detailed. It is instead a popular history of one of the great theological debates of the early church – the Arian controversy. As that, it is a great read. I should say that I am no theologian, my knowledge of the time period and of the theological questions at issue in the Arian controversy are superficial at best, but from a layman’s perspective, Rubenstein brings the goods.

Briefly, the Arian controversy was about the nature of Christ and his relationship to god the Father. Was Christ the son of god, a part of god, or simple a prophet? Was he to be worshipped and if so, how? These were the issues that brought monks and priests of the fourth century into conflict and man did they get mad. Bitter fights, violence, excommunications, this controversy had it all. When it was all over we had the dogma which has remained the center piece of the Catholic faith – the trinity and the divine nature of Jesus.

Many biblical controversies seem silly in hindsight, but not the Arian controversy. That those who backed Jesus’s divine nature and the conception of the trinity won had a massive and long lasting effect on the Church and on western society. All of which makes the Arian controversy an important and interesting story which Rubenstein tells well. I would recommend this to those interested in an overview of the era.

To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, James Davison Hunter, Oxford University Press (2010).

One of the major paradoxes of contemporary American politics is that Christians have never been more organized specifically as Christians, and yet the goals of their various agendas – from alleviating poverty to ending abortion – remain out of reach, regardless of the political climate and their contributions to it.

In James Davison Hunter’s insightful, valuable book, this state of affairs is revealed as not paradoxical at all, but rather the logical outcome of a process by which followers of Christ became merely one special interest group among many, identical in tactics and outlook to everyone from labor unions to package store owners. In Hunter’s telling, Christians have not co-opted the political process; rather, they’ve become completely co-opted by politics, turning their supposedly transcendent faith into a set of maxims and mottoes meant to dress up party platforms in divine garb.

Hunter identifies three principal tendencies in Christian politics: the Right, the Left, and the Neo-Anabaptists, who eschew participation in an immoral system, but who in Hunter’s view go too far in their rejection of civic participation and become, more or less, a world-hating theological community.

But he reserves most of his critique for the Right and the Left, which he argues have trivialized Christian belief, compromised their principles, and utterly failed to accomplish what they purportedly set out to do. Hunter is especially convincing when he discusses the way politics in the U.S. have become the measure by which all movements, and all public life, are judged. This nearly-universal politicization of society can be seen in very terms like “Christian conservative” and “Christian liberal”; where would someone like Dorothy Day fit in either category? Or, for that matter, John Calvin, or Gregory of Nyssa? Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, with its call for a living wage and labor unions paired with a rejection of socialism and a defense of private property, seems as inscrutable in contemporary American politics as a defense of absolute monarchy. How did Christians let themselves become so identified with the two-party system and the simplistic, Manichean politics it engenders?

Hunter’s answer is that they became seduced by the notion that politics is the simplest way to fulfill “the creation mandate” – that is, to act as salt and light in the world, changing it for the better. This has been a danger for Christianity since Constantine formally ended persecution of the church in the 4th century, and although Hunter doesn’t go into tremendous detail about caesaro-papism, the history of blending church and state offers plenty of support for his thesis that such unions rarely end well for the church.

Hunter is less surefooted when tackling the Neo-Anabaptists, whose position are very similar to his. Neo-Anabaptist thinkers like Stanley Hauerwas argue for as complete a separation as possible between the church and the world, because the latter is invariably corrupt and corrupting: “The first task of the church is to make the world the world, not to make the world more just,” as Hauerwas writes. Christians, therefore, should shun active participation in activities like politics, because of the great danger that politics will corrupt and usurp their religious convictions.

Hunter dislikes the consequences of Neo-Anabaptism, which he warns tend toward sectarianism and a quasi-gnostic dislike of the world as it exists, but he’s not as convincing in his critique of this strand as he is in his dismantling of the Christian Right and the Christian Left. Hunter clearly agrees with the Neo-Anabaptists on many points, and has trouble explaining why their logic shouldn’t lead to the conclusions they’ve adopted.

In place of world-shunning, Hunter offers the idea of “faithful presence,” which is somewhat vaguely defined, but which seems to rest on the presumption that if Christians simply act like Christians are supposed to act, they will eventually succeed in changing the world for the better, even without intending to do so.

It may be a naive notion, but it’s an attractive one. Decades of Christian participation in U.S. interest group politics has resulted in a society that is less just than it was when that participation began. It’s arresting to think that Christians could have more success living out their calling by ditching the party-building and emulating the example of Jesus Christ.